4.0.1 Public Test Realm Now Active!

Blizzard has just launched the 4.0.1 Public Test Realms! This patch will introduce the new streaming client, class & talent changes, stat changes and much more. What this patch doesn't contain is all the Cataclysm zone changes and .

General

Copied Test Realm characters are not copied with their achievement history in order to better facilitate the character copy process.

Classes: General

Many class talents, spells, and abilities have been overhauled, added, or removed.

All spell and ability tooltips will now display damage averages rather than minimum and maximum damage potential. This feature is on by default but can be changed via the Display settings under User Interface options.

Ammo has been removed from the game.

The character levels at which classes gain new spells and abilities have changed.

Many item and class stats have been changed or removed.

Rage has been normalized.

Spells and abilities no longer have multiple ranks and now scale with character level.

Talent trees have been altered. All player talent specializations have been reset, allowing for free re-specialization.

Each specialization has been reduced to a 31-point talent tree.

Players will now get a total of 41 talent points to spend.

Players will be asked to choose a specialization at level 10. Doing so will result in the unlocking of a spell or ability unique to that specialization, as well as one or more passive bonuses.

Once a talent specialization has been chosen, players may only place points in the primary tree until at least 31 points have been spent there.

Druids

Hunters

Five pets can now be stored with the hunter at all times. Any one of these five pets can be summoned via the Call Pet ability.

Focus has replaced mana as a new resource.

Hunters now start with a pet at level 1.

The Stable will now store 20 pets. If a pet is moved into the Stable, its talents are wiped.

Mages

There is now a new spell fly-out UI feature for mage portals. Clicking on the Teleport or Portal buttons will expand the list of choices available.

Paladins

Paladins now have a new resource bar.

Warlocks

There is now a new spell fly-out UI feature for warlock pets. Clicking on this single button will open up the list of available pets to summon.

Soul Shards have been removed from the game as items. Instead, they now exist as a resource system necessary for using, or altering the mechanics of certain spells.

Items

Resilience no longer reduces the chance a player will be critically hit by an opponent.

Durability: cloth, leather, and mail now have as many points of durability as plate, making the repair cost on death much closer to equal for all classes.

Professions

The glyph system has been updated to now feature three different types of glyphs. Many class glyphs have been added, altered, or moved to different glyph types.

User Interface

Spell Alerts have been added to notify players when procs on select spells and abilities occur. A visual notification will display around the character and the activated ability will be highlighted on the action bar.

The Arena Teams pane has been improved.

The Character pane has been redesigned. Character stats can now be shown or hidden via the Show All Details/Hide All Details button on the bottom left. When shown, all character stats will be visible in a window to the right of the pane. Stat sections can be reorganized by clicking and dragging them up or down the pane.

The Professions panes now have more filtering and search functionality, as well as buttons to easily link recipes in the chat frame.

A Professions screen has been added to the Spellbook to better display the details of a character’s primary and secondary professions.

Many of the yellow System Messages that would display in the chat frame when leveling up have been removed.

New text animations now alert players as they level up, also providing information on when new talents, spells and abilities are available.

Professions and Class Trainers windows have been altered to more clearly display available and upcoming purchases.

New Raid frames are now. They can also be used in place of the standard 5-player party interface via the User Interface options.

The Spellbook interface has been improved for greater ease-of-use and visual appeal.

Comments

Comment by Gnub

on 2010-09-12T16:18:49-05:00

Anyone else have the downloader crash on them repeatedly?

Yup, it crashes ever so often - and very randomly. I've tried an experiment at home, where I - upon starting the Launcher and the Downloader starts - simply close the Launcher. The Blizzard Downloader task is still running (which it also continues to do when the Launcher crashes - it just doesn't do anything), so we'll see if it has actually downloaded anything.

And no, if you just directly start the downloader, it simply says "Nothing to download". Bleh.

Comment by OptimusJ

on 2010-09-12T16:27:23-05:00

Yup, the streaming is not working, which could be a simple expected bug, BUT people who started the download EARLIER didn't got this at first, and THEN after resuming later found that streaming wasn't up anymore. That's weird because doesn't look as something that could happen without human interference. And BTW how do I type this captcha?

Comment by alastriana

Comment by Sarilyn

on 2010-09-12T19:45:10-05:00

I had a version of the PTR installed from way back when. Installed version was for 3.3.5 if I recall correctly. But it wouldn't let me log in, saying that it was unable to validate version (which isn't a surprise). I tried running the launcher, and it updated a bunch of files, but still unable to validate version.

I'm attempting to download the PTR client from battle.net, but it seems to be stuck -- it says downloading files, less than a minute remaining. And it's said this for the past ten minutes.

Is this even going to work, or do I need to download something special?

...

OK, it finally went through. And gave me a completely normal game client, logging into the live servers (not the PTR).

Where the heck am I supposed to get the PTR?

Edit: Finally found it, but they certainly didn't make it simple. If you go to Account Management after logging in, and have a PTR account, that should take you to where you can download the client. But no. I also forgot to mention that the character copy link from that area gave me an "access denied" page.

Comment by LockBlock

on 2010-09-12T21:06:19-05:00

This is the Busiest Patch EVER. You cant even copy any chars. Not a premade or a char from live.

Off of that this patch has made a lot of changes like implementing the new, whenever you lvl we'll tell you what you can get. And the new talents (which you have to make a char and lvl it to 10 to experience since the queues are full like i mentioned above) but anyway its a pretty good patch. Im kind of mad that they didnt implement the zone changes but eh, i guess that would be making it too similar to the real thing which is not there intention so i see there reasoning. All in all this will probably be a really cool patch when it hits live. It will most likely be equivalent to Echoes of Doom. I was kind of Bummed about no Archaeology but again i guess that would be too similar to Beta. So Basically this will be a interesting and exciting patch when it hits live.

Comment by Sarilyn

on 2010-09-12T23:04:56-05:00

This is the Busiest Patch EVER. You cant even copy any chars. Not a premade or a char from live.

Yep.

I didn't think that would be a problem, really. I wanted to test out the death knight changes (to figure out what they mean by "The way in which runes recharge has changed"). I made a new DK and did the quest to pick up a sword. The next quest was to runeforge it. But... no go. Runeforging won't open at all, and as I logged in there was someone else mentioning the same problem.

Back to live, I guess. Waste of an evening.

Comment by Shigy

on 2010-09-13T03:48:18-05:00

This would be great news...if I can could copy a character there.

Comment by Yizelin

on 2010-09-13T04:13:31-05:00

This would be great news...if I can could copy a character there.

if youre up, try now.. i just got a few more chars in :p

Comment by Voltt

on 2010-09-13T11:37:34-05:00

As of right now- 12:36p.m. EST -the copy your own characters button is working now. The premade character button is not though.

Comment by Biomassabc

on 2010-09-13T13:35:24-05:00

well, neither button is working here

hope this get fixed soon

Comment by Danroo

on 2010-09-13T14:06:39-05:00

Wow this thing is HUUUUGE. Takes a looong time to install, just a warner ;)

Comment by Disturbance

on 2010-09-13T15:48:46-05:00

-Starts downloading-

-2 hours later-

"2.0/15.6 GB"

Yeah.. I think I'll just not bother.

Comment by Sarilyn

on 2010-09-13T17:04:13-05:00

I never let it finish downloading last night, so this morning I restarted the launcher and did some non-WoW errands. I also copied over four of my own characters, since the premades are still unavailable. I was hoping it would be as quick as the last time I transferred characters (i.e., minutes for completion). But after I got done with my errands, the PTR had fully downloaded but still no characters.

I copied over a death knight, paladin, druid and hunter. I have no idea what would happen if I created a new death knight while the transfer was still scheduled, so I just made a new hunter at level one.

First impressions:

1. They're stupidifying the game. Quest tracking was bad enough, but at least I could turn that off. Now there's a big gold arrow pointing to your quest objectives, even if you've turned off quest tracking. Names are displayed for quest objectives, so my first quest to kill nightsabers and baby piggehs filled the screen with names. Again, no way to turn those off. Names are also displayed for corpses, even if you didn't kill the foe (yay more clutter -- this time utterly useless rather than just mostly useless).

Additionally, I heard through general chat that skills highlight when you proc something. From what I understand, if your warlock goes into a Shadow Trance, Shadow Bolt highlights (just using Shadow Trance as an example, discussion in General was on some other skill that I can't remember now).

It's very possible that these things will turn themselves off as my character levels or gets to different areas (like the ridiculous auto-accepting of quests, because pressing "Accept" was apparently a daunting task for some players). But it's a bad impression.

2. Hunters start with a noisy cat. My hunter on live has a nice, quiet crab. The cats groan and moan just about every time I stop, even after turning off pet sounds. However, having a pet at level one is nice (although I think having a dragonhawk for blood elves is a bad idea, but maybe that's just because I've always hated targeting foes while having a flying pet getting in the way).

The cat did have a bad habit of getting the enemy to the null spot for my hunter. Too far for melee weapons, too close for bow. Several times I found my hunter doing nothing at all, and had to move a bit to use a weapon. This will greatly confuse the mouth breathers who can't figure out how to press Accept (yes, I'm overly irritated by auto-accept, I'm trying to get over it). I'm not sure if this was due to the fact that it's a cat (my crab usually Pins the enemy a lot farther out) or just that the cat was low level and my hunter was pulling aggro... hopefully it'll get better as levels progress.

3. Focus for hunters... so far, I like it a lot. My hunter on live, at level 51, still has to switch Aspects. Aspect of the Hawk for actual damage, then Aspect of the Viper to regen mana (or drink every third fight, super annoying). I know that low level characters have super regen for health and mana, but I suspect that the hunters' focus will work very similarly as it does for rogues. Meaning no downtime, and no half-effectiveness with Aspect of the Viper.

4. Skill ups are weird. I got a new skill (Steady Shot) at level 3, and beast tracking at level 4. Nothing at level 5, which is where I left off (the test realm died to lag). It does do the flashy "You can has new skillz!" message on level up, but that goes away quickly and my memory is often like a wet sponge. So it'll take some getting used to when new skills are available. Every even level was (is) pretty easy to remember.

Two final positives: No ammo for ranged weapons is fantastic, and multiple item tracking is the bee's knees.

Overall I think it's pretty positive, with a few really annoying quirks.

Comment by Carimm

on 2010-09-13T20:07:14-05:00

I crash every 5 minutes, so I'm not going back onto PTR :(

Comment by FoShizzle8

on 2010-09-13T23:15:14-05:00

so i was thinkin today.i got banned on the last ptr,and i guess im still banned cuz it said so when i tried logging in

but i was just thinkin.lets say,i got another email adress and made another battle.net account.could i get on the ptr again.im just wondering if this would work because i dont know if you can get banned for doing it

Comment by khandom

on 2010-09-14T07:37:05-05:00

Just got my main on the PTR. Still unable to get a premaid copied over though.

Comment by Carimm

on 2010-09-14T10:30:55-05:00

so i was thinkin today.i got banned on the last ptr,and i guess im still banned cuz it said so when i tried logging in

but i was just thinkin.lets say,i got another email adress and made another battle.net account.could i get on the ptr again.im just wondering if this would work because i dont know if you can get banned for doing it

I think you have to have an active account thats NOT banned, you can't just have a b.net account without WoW on it.

Comment by FoShizzle8

on 2010-09-14T12:05:55-05:00

so i was thinkin today.i got banned on the last ptr,and i guess im still banned cuz it said so when i tried logging in

but i was just thinkin.lets say,i got another email adress and made another battle.net account.could i get on the ptr again.im just wondering if this would work because i dont know if you can get banned for doing it

I think you have to have an active account thats NOT banned, you can't just have a b.net account without WoW on it.

so,if i only had 1 WoW account and it was banned the only way i could get on the ptr is to get another account.cuz im not paying for 2 accounts just so i can get on the ptr

Comment by Carimm

on 2010-09-26T17:02:07-05:00

well if your other account is banned you aren't paying for it. Likewise if its banned you can't do ANYTHING with it, ptr included.

Comment by mijoruk

on 2010-10-13T09:35:01-05:00

Oh god, this patch takes forever to install! I'm on 20% right now, and it's been 33 minutes. It seems to be stuck now by the way. I guess I'll play WC3 or something.